ABSTRACT
Within a year of its inauguration on 1 October 1931, the NS-Frauenschaft had evolved, from being merely the collective body of women Party members working away in the local branches, to achieving a distinctly centralised identity and developing a variety of projects to be pursued on a nationwide basis with a fair degree of autonomy. Three major reforms, in April, June and September 1932, culminated in the elevation of Elsbeth Zander’s Section for Women’s Work to the status of a Main Department of the Party’s Organisation Office (ROL) in October 1932. This development was certainly not implicit in Strasser’s orders of July and November 1931, in which his overriding purpose had been to eliminate the damaging strife among the women’s groups and to create a useful and stable women’s auxiliary. But three factors seem to have persuaded him that the emphasis in the NSF should be shifted from the performance of purely local activities with little overall co-ordination of the women’s work to the construction of a women’s organisation as such, with its own central organisation and leadership corps. In the first place, this development was fully consistent with the general reorganisation of the Party structure which consumed much of Strasser’s energy in summer 1932. 1 Further, the Party’s disappointing impact on women voters in the almost continuous round of local, Land and national elections in 1932 demonstrated the unfavourable effect of much of the Party’s propaganda about women’s role and its value to the Nazis’ opponents as electoral ammunition. 2 Strengthening the NSF, upgrading its status, and allowing it some independence were partly designed to combat this. And finally, Strasser seems to have been impressed by the energy and enthusiasm of the Gau NSF leaders, who assembled at two conferences in 1932, and to have been persuaded by them that the NSF should be brought more into the mainstream of Party activity.
